Ryan Reynolds requests to be dropped from Justin Baldoni’s lawsuit in wife Blake Lively’s legal battle

CNN — Ryan Reynolds is asking a judge to drop him as a defendant from Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit, claiming that Baldoni’s argument against him has no legal bounds and amounts to “hurt feelings.” The filing – submitted on Tuesday and obtained by CNN – claims that the lawsuit Baldoni filed against Reynolds and wife Blake Lively is based on two times that Reynolds allegedly called Baldoni a “predator,” but that nothing in Baldoni’s suit suggests that Reynolds did not believe this to be true. Reynolds genuinely, perhaps passionately, believes that Mr. Baldoni’s behavior is reflective of a ‘predator,’” Reynolds’ filing reads, adding that “calling someone a ‘predator’ amounts to a constitutionally protected opinion.” Reynolds’ lawyers also claim Baldoni’s “thin-skinned outrage over a movie character” – referring to the Nicepool character in Reynolds’ “Deadpool & Wolverine” movie – “does not even pretend to be tied to any legal claims” and instead is just Baldoni alleging that he has “hurt feelings.” In the motion, attorneys for Lively and Reynolds wrote that while Lively sued Baldoni and his business associates for sexual harassment and subsequent retaliation, Reynolds has nothing to do with the situation and that his only involvement has been as a “supportive spouse.” Their lawyers claim that Reynolds is only named as a defendant in Baldoni’s suit because Steve Sarowitz – a defendant in Lively’s case against Baldoni and his team, one of Baldoni’s business partners at his production company, Wayfarer Studios, which produced and co-financed “It Ends With Us” with Sony – “promised to spend up to $100 million to ‘ruin’ Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds,” according to the filing. In Baldoni’s lawsuit against the Hollywood couple, as well as Lively’s publicist Leslie Sloane, Baldoni accused Reynolds of assisting Lively in “hijacking” his film “It Ends With Us” and taking down his career. He also claimed that Lively sought to take over much of the film’s creative direction, including having Reynolds, who had no formal role on “It Ends With Us,” re-write a scene and make “unauthorized changes to the script in secret.” Baldoni also accused Reynolds of reprimanding him at the couple’s home in New York, claiming that Reynolds once “swore at Baldoni and accused him of fat-shaming his wife” and alleged in his lawsuit that Reynolds made fun of him in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” mirroring the character Nicepool after Baldoni in an effort to mock him.